It is entirely possible for the path to be an empty string and many
unit tests actually pass it as an empty string (e.g. both_roundrip or
turnsEmptyPathIntoCWD). In this case, without this patch, absPath will
perform a one-byte out-of-bounds access.
This was discovered while enabling the nix test suite on Alpine where
we compile all software with `-D_GLIBCXX_ASSERTIONS=1`, thus resulting
in a test failure on Alpine.
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